Wednesday, February 05, 2014

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S planned directive to increase the minimum wage for employees of federal government contractors has prompted the usual tiresome reactions in Washington and the media echo chamber we euphemistically call “debate.”
But the national discourse continues to sleepwalk past this out-of-the-box question: How about setting a maximum wage for government officials and top-paid government contractors?
Here’s how it would work:
If the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors rose to $10.10 an hour from $7.25, the president’s $400,000 salary would move to 20 times that of the lowest-paid worker, from roughly 27 times.
We should then enact laws to ensure that top-paid federal executives — and, critically, top-paid executives of companies that do business with the federal government — are never paid in excess of 20-to-1 (or perhaps even 27-to-1) compared with their lowest-paid workers.